La Dolce Vita (1960)

Review:

The centerpiece of Federico Fellini’s masterpiece “La Dolce Vita” is a segment surrounding faith. We are introduced to Steiner (Alain Cuny), the friend of the film’s star Marcello (Marcello Mastoianni), in a church. Steiner plays on the church organ, explaining the priests let him play it so long as it’s nothing offensive. He then plays Bach’s Toccata & Fuge in D Minor, one of the most ominous pieces of music ever written.

Soon thereafter, Fellini takes Marcello into the countryside outside of Rome where two children have purportedly seen the Virgin Mary in a vision. Crowds of people have come to see the children and the place where they saw the holy mother. It is a small field with a single tree and the place has become a media circus. Reporters are everywhere. People have brought their sick and wounded. Cameramen circle like vultures. The crowd is illuminated by giant lights. When the children arrive it begins to rain. The boy and girl whisper to each other and then shout that they see the Virgin Mary “Over there” and then “Over there.” They run from place to place with the raucous crowd behind them. It is clear the children have made up this vision. Then it is announced that one of the invalids has died, perhaps trampled by the crowd or drowned in the rain. The farcical display of blind faith leads to innocent deaths. This is not the last innocent death in “La Dolce Vita.”

Fellini then returns to Steiner - calm, reserved Steiner - a man who likes to tape record the sound of thunder. Marcello is invited to his apartment where Steiner is throwing a party with poets, folk singers, journalists, and explorers in attendance. We meet Steiner’s beautiful wife and young children. We learn that Steiner is a writer of great reputation. This is everything that Marcello wants. This is his vision of the sweet life.

But in juxtaposing the scenes with Steiner and the scenes with the child prophets, Fellini suggests that any notion of “the sweet life” is based on false faith. Later we will find that Steiner’s elegant life was nothing more than a terrible façade, a false vision. There is no such thing as the sweet life. This is the hard lesson Marcello will learn through the course of the film.

“La Dolce Vita” is a hard film to explain. It does not have the typical story arc of a Hollywood picture. The film is episodic but to explain each episode would be futile, because Fellini films are not so much about a story as about the evocation of feelings and ideas. Plot summaries simply will not suffice for Fellini’s masterpieces.

Alas, I’ll grant a vague overview: we follow Marcello, a gossip columnist, through his adventures and foibles in Rome. He meets movie stars and royalty, he attends strange, raunchy parties, he fights with his girlfriend, makes love to his mistress and he longs to become better than he is.

But whenever I think of “La Dolce Vita” and whenever I watch it (I’ve seen it four times now) I cannot get Steiner out of my head. Steiner haunts me because what he says and what he does seem so realistic, so plausible. The message then, in terms of Marcello’s development, is that you shouldn’t want to be who you want to be - you should have no faith in an ideal. But what then do you have left to hope for? What can you have faith in? These are scary questions and the ending of “La Dolce Vita” is one of my favorite endings to any movie because it doesn’t have the answers.

From time immemorial, in the realm of narratives, most stories end with a death or a coupling. “La Dolce Vita” ends with neither and we are left to wonder.

Rating:

On a scale of one to Casablanca, this film is a “Schindler’s List” (1993)

Rationalization:

In some ways, Schindler and Marcello end their respective films in the same state of mind. Schindler’s insistence that he could have done more echoes Marcello’s despair at the end of “La Dolce Vita.” Both men are overwhelmed with grief and both men literally stumble. It is a scary truth that when we look at ourselves in the mirror we weigh our shortcomings rather than measure our accomplishments. Not even men like Schindler are exempt from this. Marcello is by no means a great man, but his tragedy is that he knows he could have been better. The same goes for all of us. ‘The Everyman’ is maybe the scariest thing movies have to offer us.